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Ubuntu on Beaglebone Black

I recently recieved my beaglebone black which is an awesome piece of hardware. Checkout the specs, its an amazing board for electronic hobbyists and better in some aspects than raspberry pi since it has much more GPIOs .

Beaglebone Black comes with in built 2gb emmc card which has armstrong installed on it. But if you are like most of the linux users, you’ll prefer ubuntu mostly. So here is a step by step tutorial on how to install ubuntu on your BBB and get it up and running with LXDE desktop. Also updating internet settings if you are on a proxy.

Installing ubuntu
Go to this link : http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu there is a very elaborate procedure to install ubuntu on your external mmc (since 2gb is a very limited space, install ubuntu on external mmc and to boot ubuntu press button on BBB near ur USB)

Once done with installing ubuntu on card, plug it into your BBB and boot it. The login name and password are both ubuntu. Log in. Now first thing you have to do is sudo apt-get update. Now for people on a proxy see below instructions rest can skip it,

So if your proxy server uses static ips then you have to set up the same in your /etc/network/interfaces file, to do sosudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Once done you are good to go if your proxy requires authentication then you have one more step to go, in your /etc/apt/apt.conf file add proxy auth details. This is a good link which explains how to do it.

Now that proxy is set up, you should try sudo apt-get update and this should run as expected

Installing ubuntu desktopTo install ubuntu desktop use sudo apt-get -y install lxde lxde-core lxde-icon-theme, this will take some while to download all the packages and ever more time to install them on BBB. Sit back for a while, if you are on a slow internet start an episode of your favourite TV series and relax. Once installed, restart your BBB and you are good to go.